Allies say Emanuel might stay to 2011

For all the talk about Rahm Emanuel reaching for the “eject” button, the fiery White House chief of staff isn’t leaving in the immediate future — and could serve well into 2011, according to people close to him.

“It’s the opinion in the top levels of the White House that Rahm is going to be here longer than many people think,” said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

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Speculation about Emanuel’s departure has been a favorite parlor game for nearly a year — stoked by Emanuel’s admission that he’d love to run for Chicago mayor (should current Mayor Richard Daley retire, of course), his own kvetching about the rigors of the job, withering attacks on him from the left and the right and the fact that the average expiration date on a chief of staff is 18 months.

Emanuel is leaving, but his departure date has proved to be profoundly elastic. Friends and co-workers said he vacillates from day to day, sometimes minute to minute. He might leave in December after the midterms; or he might stay until next summer, depending on whether Daley runs or President Barack Obama asks him to stick around, they said.

And even as he pines for his native Chicago, Emanuel continues to put down real roots in D.C., recently writing the check to enroll his children in the exclusive Maret School in Washington through the 2011 school year, according to a person close to Emanuel.

He’s shown few signs of loosening his grip on the tiller — bombarding White House staffers with long-distance calls during the first days of the Gulf oil spill even as he traveled in Israel for his son’s bar mitzvah.

And in a broader sense, it’s hard to imagine Emanuel’s huge personality extracted from the political, journalistic and bar stool life of Obama’s Washington.

Take the last game of last week’s NBA Finals, when any American voter could wander into Tunnicliff’s Tavern on Capitol Hill and witness one of the most powerful men in the nation egging on the Boston Celtics — screaming at the flat-screen TV, actually — joined by a merry band that included Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.); Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.); Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.); and a pair of favorite reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Despite a story in the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph asserting that Emanuel is sick of Obama’s “idealism” and is racing for the exit, the former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman still loves the attention and power of his current job and hasn’t made up his mind when he’s leaving, people who know him said.

“This is BS. And if you need it for translation, it is baseless,” Emanuel said in a statement pushing back against a story in the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph portraying Emanuel as restless and fed up. Replacing Emanuel, when he eventually goes, will be no easy task for Obama and the small clique of close advisers led by Pete Rouse, David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett.

Even as Emanuel decides, he’s fending off several embarrassing disclosures, starting with the disclosure that a top deputy dangled the possibility of administration jobs to a Colorado Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff in hopes of forcing Romanoff out of a Democratic primary against Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.). And on Tuesday, the AP reported on a 2006 exchange between then-Rep. Emanuel and a top staffer to disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich that suggests Emanuel backed Blagojevich in a battle with a newspaper editorial board in exchange for a $2 million state grant for his district.

For one thing, Obama and company need to know what the post-November political landscape looks like before picking a successor: If Republicans take back one or more house of Congress, the new chief of staff will need to know how to leverage executive power against a hostile Hill; if Democrats retain their majorities, Emanuel’s successor will need some of his legislative skills.